Hi All,

I have been asked to create a "database" using excel. This database would
encompass all shipping & receiving information including donor & consignee
information, as well as inventrory control and procurement & fulfillment
information.

I would be required to design "ïnput forms" for inexperienced computer
users, as well as generate a variety of reports.

I'm not so sure that Excel was designed for this type of information
gathering. I have used MS Access in the past for these types of things.
However, I have been requested to use Excel for this project.

Am I not seeing the full potential of Excel?

Please, any input, suggestions, comments will be welcomed.

Cmennis

hi
you gut feeling are correct. excel was NOT designed for a project of your
magnitude. but Access was.
in the past, some individuals have had some success at creating a small
database with limited functions in excel but all to often, the data base
grows into a data managment nightmare perticularly if it spills over into
multiple files.
believe me. been there, done that. real dumb.
you mentioned.....
Shipping functions
receiving functions
inventory control
purchasing functions
Reports.
input forms.
no way would a sane person try to tie all of the above togeather in an excel
file much less skew into multiple files.
excel and access do work well togather. but not in using excel as a input
"front end" for access. excel does make an excellent output "backend" for
access for extracting reports from the access database via MS Query.
I woudl seriously reconsider trying to do your project in excel. Access was
design to do exactly what you were assign to do.

My thoughts
Regards
FSt1

"Cmennis" wrote:

Hi All,

I have been asked to create a "database" using excel. This database would
encompass all shipping & receiving information including donor & consignee
information, as well as inventrory control and procurement & fulfillment
information.

I would be required to design "ïnput forms" for inexperienced computer
users, as well as generate a variety of reports.

I'm not so sure that Excel was designed for this type of information
gathering. I have used MS Access in the past for these types of things.
However, I have been requested to use Excel for this project.

Am I not seeing the full potential of Excel?

Please, any input, suggestions, comments will be welcomed.

Cmennis

Hi,

It is probably possible to do everything you want in Excel - of course this
is an Excel newsgroup, so what answer could one expect? However, a number
of years ago I got a call from a HP, they wanted me to come in and interview
for a contract in which Excel would be used like a database. Before I went
in I was told by someone else who had gone in that they had interviewed 30
Office programmers and all of them said the job should be done in Access.
At the interview, HP asked me could I do it in Excel, I said yes. I got the
job right then and there. Moto - if your client want it in Excel give it to
them in Excel. If they as for your opinion then suggest Access.

You can create user input forms in Excel. You can do many database
operations such as queries and sort and subtotal pretty easily. You can use
the pivot table feature to allow very flexible analysis of the data. You
can even do relational database type operations with VLOOKUP or by creating
ODBC connections to various tables to allow for relational database queries.
In 2003 one limit is 65,536 rows but that is 1,048,376 in 2007.

Cheers,
Shane Devenshire
Microsoft Excel MVP
Join http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ and download a free screensaver and
help search for life beyond earth.

"Cmennis" wrote in message
...
Hi All,

I have been asked to create a "database" using excel. This database would
encompass all shipping & receiving information including donor & consignee
information, as well as inventrory control and procurement & fulfillment
information.

I would be required to design "ïnput forms" for inexperienced computer
users, as well as generate a variety of reports.

I'm not so sure that Excel was designed for this type of information
gathering. I have used MS Access in the past for these types of things.
However, I have been requested to use Excel for this project.

Am I not seeing the full potential of Excel?

Please, any input, suggestions, comments will be welcomed.

Cmennis

Excel can manage it, and if the data is not large, it will manage it easily.

Excel has some wonderful built-in functionality, such as data validation,
pivot tables, charting, conditional formatting, filtering, that can make
your application so rich, and the IDE is pretty good.

Even if you store the data in Access, Excel is a far better front-end, and
mixing the two is very simple using queries (although I personally would
never use Access when SQL Server Express is free).

You could always prototype your application using Excel tables, query the
data and report in Excel, abstracting the data logic, business logic and
data input logic into separate layers. You could then migrate the data to a
real database (that is, NOT Access) at some future date.

--
---
HTH

Bob


(there's no email, no snail mail, but somewhere should be gmail in my addy)



"Cmennis" wrote in message
...
Hi All,

I have been asked to create a "database" using excel. This database would
encompass all shipping & receiving information including donor & consignee
information, as well as inventrory control and procurement & fulfillment
information.

I would be required to design "ïnput forms" for inexperienced computer
users, as well as generate a variety of reports.

I'm not so sure that Excel was designed for this type of information
gathering. I have used MS Access in the past for these types of things.
However, I have been requested to use Excel for this project.

Am I not seeing the full potential of Excel?

Please, any input, suggestions, comments will be welcomed.

Cmennis

My 2-cents pretty much echos the sentiments of others. Excel can do it with
a bit of effort; Access can do it almost effortlessly. Very good results can
be achieved by combining Access as the data storage tool with Excel acting as
a front end for data entry and results/summary/report presentation.

Size does matter here - typically in a large database, especially inventory
control, you run out of either rows or columns in Excel because of trying to
track all receipts/usage of material items. Where Access doesn't suffer from
that kind of problem.

My experience in this area? Two I can think of right away:

I built a very successful system for a very well known communication company
used at the national level to track all equipment purchases and installations
that used Excel as the user interface with a central Access database as the
data warehouse. That was actually accomplished using Office 97 versions of
Excel, Access and Outlook. The stretch there was using Access to deal with
the quantity of data that was being handled (as many as 400 new records per
week.

More recently, using Excel 2003, I completed an inventory management system
(IMS) for a company that has a limited number of products (about 150) that
are made up from a relatively small number of material items (under 1000).
It is not what you might think of as a full-featured IMS - it tracks receipts
and usage and provides warehouse balance on hand of materials and can provide
information as to whether or not there are enough materials on hand to
produce a given quantity of product, along with replacement cost of materials
in the warehouse in case of total loss. But it does this accurately and
these are the features that the client wanted - they even asked for this
'stripped' down IMS after having looked at more full bodied commercial tools
which they found were all overkill for their needs. This one uses one file
for the Inventory management part, with a central master list of materials
..xls file to provide basic material information such as name, source and
cost, and 1 Excel file per product to provide material usage information for
that product. A lot of VBA coding involved in finding the proper .xls files
to extract usage info from and pull it into the IMS file, along with doing
the updating of the warehouse balance on hand calculations.


"Cmennis" wrote:

Hi All,

I have been asked to create a "database" using excel. This database would
encompass all shipping & receiving information including donor & consignee
information, as well as inventrory control and procurement & fulfillment
information.

I would be required to design "ïnput forms" for inexperienced computer
users, as well as generate a variety of reports.

I'm not so sure that Excel was designed for this type of information
gathering. I have used MS Access in the past for these types of things.
However, I have been requested to use Excel for this project.

Am I not seeing the full potential of Excel?

Please, any input, suggestions, comments will be welcomed.

Cmennis